Pouring Gasoline on the Fire
Contributed by Dana Raffaniello
A recent column in these pages concluded, with caveats, that ICE agents are essentially comparable to the Gestapo or that we are heading there. I want to respond not because the question is illegitimate, but because the framing carries real-world consequences the column does not acknowledge honestly.
The author concedes that ICE “could carry out their duties legally, quietly, and efficiently, as they have in the past.” That sentence does significant work. It acknowledges that immigration enforcement is a legitimate government function, that most agents are, in her own words, “kind, loving people” who are “our neighbors, friends, ordinary people,” and that her primary objection is to the manner of enforcement, not the existence of immigration law. That is not a Gestapo comparison. That is a policy disagreement and policy disagreements deserve policy arguments, not analogies to Nazi Germany’s secret police.
The Gestapo did not enforce democratically enacted laws. It operated outside the law, answering to a totalitarian party apparatus with no judicial oversight and no constitutional framework. Its purpose was political terror. Comparing agents enforcing federal statutes, currently subject to multiple active judicial challenges in exactly the way a constitutional system is supposed to work, to that institution is not analysis. It is inflammatory language designed to produce an emotional response, and the author is sophisticated enough to know it.
The column even acknowledges the danger directly. She writes that such comparisons “might serve to denigrate” agents “to the point where they are also endangered.” She is aware that the comparison puts human beings at physical risk. She makes it, anyway, wrapped in qualification to provide rhetorical cover. That is not careful moral reasoning. That is having it both ways.
Here is what the column does not address: consequences. We have documented evidence from Minnesota of what happens when federal law enforcement is framed as an occupying force that communities have a moral duty to resist. Organized networks tracked agent movements using a database of over 4,600 vehicles. Coordinated teams worked around the clock to physically block enforcement operations. Hotels were stormed. Two people are dead. A leaked communications network showed political operatives directing the operation under code names with emoji-coded roles for mobile patrols, stationary lookouts, and medics.
This did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from an environment where comparing immigration enforcement to Nazi secret police had become normalized commentary. And it is not contained to adults. Across the country, school staff have been organizing students to walk out and protest federal immigration enforcement in many cases without notifying parents, using the same advocacy network talking points driving the conflict in Minnesota. When a trusted authority figure organizes children to stand against federal law enforcement, the lesson is not civic participation. The lesson is that those agents are an enemy. That framing, carried into adulthood, connects directly to the environment that produced Minnesota.
The author writes that “silence changes us” that failing to speak out makes us complicit. I agree completely. Which is why I am not staying silent: rhetoric comparing American law enforcement to the Gestapo, published in a community where school staff are organizing students to protest those same officers without parental knowledge, is not speaking truth to power. It provides intellectual cover for an escalation that has already turned lethal.
Legitimate concerns deserve legitimate treatment. Are there heavy-handed enforcement cases? Yes, and federal courts are adjudicating them. Have individuals with legal status been incorrectly detained? Yes, and those cases should be challenged through legal channels Is there a genuine policy debate to be had? Absolutely and it deserves to be made honestly, not dressed up as a moral emergency.
None of that requires the Gestapo analogy. What the analogy does is transform a policy disagreement into a moral emergency requiring immediate resistance and resistance means different things to different people. Some write columns. Some organize walkouts. Others track agents’ vehicles around the clock and storm their hotels. Words create environments. Environments produce behavior. Two people are dead, and those who built that environment are now claiming they only meant to raise awareness.
We can debate immigration policy. We should. But we owe each other the honesty of debating it as what it is: a genuine, difficult question about law, sovereignty, and human dignity. Not a reenactment of history’s darkest chapter, with federal agents cast as villains and organized resistance as heroism. That framing does not inform. It inflames. And the damage does not stop with today’s readers it continues with every student who was handed a sign and told which side of history to stand on.
The Gestapo comparison is not analysis. It is gasoline. And this community deserves better than that.